The rise of the Internet has enabled access to a wide variety of content items, e.g., video and/or audio files, web pages for particular subjects, news articles, advertisements etc. Such content items of particular interest to a user can be identified by a search engine and/or an advertising system in response to a user query. One example search engine is the Google search engine provided by Google Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., U.S.A. The query can include one or more search terms or phrases, and the search engine can identify and, optionally, rank the content items based on the search terms or phrases in the query and present the content items to the user (e.g., in order according to the rank).
An example advertising system is the Google Adwords™ system. The Adwords™ system can compare a user query submitted to the Google search engine to a list of keywords specified by an advertiser and provide targeted ads that are relevant to the query of the user. Similarly, the AdSense™ system can identify the content of a web property (e.g., a web page) of a third party online publisher and deliver advertisements that are relevant to the content, and thus likely of interest to users viewing the web property. Other advertising and searching systems can also be used.
Various on-line metric values with respect to content items such as search results and advertisements can be measured, such as clicks, click-through rates, conversions, conversion rates, quality, etc. These metric values can be used to tune the performance of search engines and/or advertising systems by establishing standards and performance requirements. For example, an advertisement with a very high click-through rate for a query may be determined to be more relevant to the query than an advertisement with a very low click-through rate for the query. Similarly, an advertisement that does not meet a minimum quality value may be precluded from auction, or a minimum cost associated with the advertisement (e.g., a minimum cost per click) may be increased in substantially inverse proportion to the quality value.
While tuning the performance of the search engine or the advertising system on such metric values may optimize performance for certain markets, e.g., the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom, such tuning may not necessarily optimize the performance for other markets, e.g., Italy, France, the Pacific Rim countries, etc. Different markets, e.g., countries and regions, can be unique for a variety of different reasons, such as economically, technologically, culturally, socially, politically, geographically, etc. For example, merely increasing a quality threshold without considering other system parameters may result in showing higher quality advertisements; however, a particular country may have an advertising base in which very few advertisers have such high quality advertisements. Thus, while the desired result of showing higher quality advertisings may be achieved, the result may nevertheless severely impact the advertising market, as the quality requirement may inadvertently cause a barrier to entry into the on-line advertising market.
Accordingly, it can be difficult to understand how to adjust standards and other performance parameters for the different markets that result in the selection of higher quality advertisements without adversely impacting revenue in the long term. If the negative long term revenue effects can be minimized, or positive long term revenue effects can be realized, then higher quality requirements for advertisements can be implemented. The showing of the higher quality advertisements can, in turn, lead to greater audience trust.